The U.S. Forest Service says it may start charging hikers for permits to walk up some of the fourteeners in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Colorado to pay for building and maintaining the trails there.
As a one-time hiker and yearly visitor to Rocky Mountain National Park, this seems a reasonable way to let users pay some of the very substantial cost of park maintenance, including paying the salaries of rangers, providing campgrounds and making it possible to tour many of our national parks by car.
My list, however, would be longer than the Forest Service’s. By all means, sell peak permits. It does cost more to maintain a trail up to the top of a mountain 14,000-plus feet high than one that goes to a roadside lake.
In RMNP the vast majority of the hikers on the trails satistfy themselves with round trips of five miles or less. Charge ’em? Sure. But to keep park personnel costs and paper consumption low, sell them a two-week hiking permit for $20 and let them hike as much as they wish.
Yearly permits for $50 would accommodate those who live within a half-day’s drive and hike when the mood strikes and weather permits.
Campground fees should be increased so that annual costs are actually paid by the thousands upon thousands who use the campgrounds each year rather than national taxpayers. I have no idea how much campground permits would cost a night, week or fortnight if this were done. If being user-funded would push fees be-yond reach of the average family budget (re-membering that a movie, popcorn and soft drink might cost $12 for each set of eyeballs), settle on campground fees based on the cost of other entertainment families choose to pay for throughout the year.
Most Americans learn what they know about our nation’s magnificent system of national parks from their automobiles. Charging the general public to hike would bring in far less than a more realistic fee — on a per person basis — for entering a park than is now charged. Parks such as Rocky Mountain, Yosemite and Yellowstone have millions of visitors yearly. If each of us paid the cost of a burger, fries and a fizzy drink to enter and drive through, the park system budget problem would be solved.
Or, to make another comparison, how much does a family spend for gasoline to get to a park portal? Isn’t it reasonable to set the entrance fee at the cost of a couple of gallons of gasoline apiece?
THE POINT of these speculations is that user fees are a fairer way to pay for maintaining — not creating or constructing, just maintaining — our national parks than is general taxation. For the fact is that a very substantial percentage of the population doesn’t visit a park more than once in five years; some never at all. And those who feel a year would be lost without that tonic know that the fees they pay are the best bargain they make each year from January through December. Let them pay more; when they do, most will smile and say to themselves, “how cheap, how ridiculously cheap.”
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
